Gardens & Landscapes

Posts about urban or rural landscaping

Treecare in the Middle-East

I am working as a consulting arborist in the UAE for a couple of large projects.  Whilst there, I have been observing the broad state of the art and there is a long way to go in bringing across current best practice to the Middle-East, and I suspect that is so for many parts of

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Why we can – and MUST – create new Adaptive Ecosystems

This article was written in 2013 and updated in April 2019. I’ve written before on the subject of adaptive landscapes and trans-migrational landscapes but I’ve been reading recently of a real-life ecology that was created by man in the last 150 years, and is thriving.  This is on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean, a

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Why Gardens must Save our Wildlife

I was chatting to the local farm manager the other day, out on the snow-lined track.  “There’s nothing in the hedgerows for the birds” he told me.  It made me glad that there was in my garden, which borders the track and fields.  It also brought home such a startling truth:  the birds need us

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Trees, Climate Change & our Landscapes…

I’ve been doing a lot of research since writing my blog post on trans-migrational landscapes, my theory on how we have to adapt our natural environments – or rather, help them adapt – to combat the rapidly increasing effects of climate change.  It’s not going to be easy; right now I’m not sure if we

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Trans-migrational Landscapes -a survival strategy for the world?

With the climate shifting now so rapidly that we cannot foresee what the future may bring – or rather, with an ever increasing certainty of life as we know it struggling to survive – do we need a new approach to our understanding and management of our natural landscapes?  I think this will become inevitable

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Building Bio-Systems – it should be an all-out War (effort)

I gave a talk last week on Internal Bio-Systems for buildings, to eFIG, the European Federation of Interiors Group (http://www.efig.eu.com/) which was reported on swiftly by Horticulture Week .  They picked up on my use of the phrase “war-footing” for the kind of response levels needed to deal with the issues at hand.  Why?  Well,

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